Save the Date for Rosetta's Violent Death

A purposeful, fatal crash is set for September 30.

Elena Duvernay/Stocktrek ImagesGetty Images

The Rosetta spacecraft, which has been orbiting comet 67P for the last two years, has been given an official expiration date by the European Space Agency. The agency has announced that Rosetta will be programmed to crash onto the comet on September 30, giving it only three more months to live.

Rosetta is getting a scheduled demise because its comet, 67P, is now drifting into the outer reaches of the solar system, where it was not designed to survive. 67P will soon be nearing the orbit of Jupiter and if the ESA does nothing, Rosetta will run out of solar power and enter a sleep mode, never to emerge from its digital coma. So the Rosetta team has decided to crash the orbiter into the comet before then, gathering a bunch of useful data in the moments before its violent death.

The process will start in August, as the spacecraft's operators will begin changing Rosetta's trajectory to bring it increasingly close to the comet. This is actually a very complex operation, due to the comet's non-uniform gravitational field. The Rosetta team will continuously monitor and update the spacecraft's trajectory to keep it from crashing into the comet before it's supposed to.

The mission will end with one final trajectory change twelve hours before the impact that will put Rosetta on its final descent. Rosetta will continue collecting data, including high-resolution imagery until the impact, at which point all onboard equipment will shut off, rendering the spacecraft effectively dead.

Rosetta has lived a long life. It was launched in March of 2004, and spent its early years flying around the inner solar system, briefly orbiting Mars in 2007 and taking close-up shots of an asteroid in 2010. It reached comet 67P in 2014, and in 2015 we all watched with bated breath as we wondered if the Philae lander would be OK. Unfortunately, Philae didn't make it. But Rosetta carried on, dutifully collecting data and imaging comet 67P, providing invaluable observations to the scientists here on Earth.

After twelve years of life, Rosetta will finally join its companion craft on the surface of that small, icy world. Go not go gentle into that cold abyss.

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